Author Talks: How pop culture pitted millennial women against each other at work

Yes, being a #girlboss sounded great. But what did it really mean for women at work? In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Lucia Rahilly chats with Sophie Gilbert, staff writer at The Atlantic, about Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves (Penguin Press/Penguin Random House, Spring 2025). Gilbert analyzes some of the ways turn-of-the-century pop culture shaped millennials’ vision of women’s power and potential—and created a legacy that may continue to limit some men and women’s progress to this day. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.

Why this book, and why now?

In 2020, I had twins in New York City during COVID-19, which was a very isolating experience. As a critic at The Atlantic, I read, I watch movies and TV, and I think about culture all day long. Yet during my parental leave, I was so exhausted and depressed that I couldn’t do any of those things. And I lost my sense of self in various ways.

When I went back to work, I was very interested in how culture supports our sense of identity and informs our beliefs. I wanted to look at the women of my generation—millennial women—to see how the culture of the era we’d grown up with, against this backdrop of extravagant sexism, had taught us to think and feel about ourselves, and how it might have defined our ambitions.

How did media portrayals of women change in the early 2000s?

I start the book in 1999, when I was 16. It was the year of Britney Spears’s song “Baby One More Time.” She’s 16 years old and in a school uniform. So many women have described it to me as the end of their childhood, the rip in the fabric of time. American Beauty, a film also launched in 1999, was about a man’s midlife crisis and his crush on his teenage daughter’s best friend. The film American Pie came out that same year.

There were all these cultural products that enforced the idea of power for women, and for girls especially, as being sexual in nature. The influence of porn as the hot new medium of the time was really starting to be felt. It was new, cool, daring, and bold in so many forms of media.

You describe a shift in focus from collective to individual. What did it mean for women?

1992 was the “Year of the Woman.” There was a big movement to get women more active politically, to have women stand up and be counted. Third-wave feminism was very inclusive—all about collective energy, sisterhood, intersectional thinking, and actions women could take to build each other up.

Then, over the course of the ’90s, third-wave feminism became postfeminism. It was an energy and a shift that was really felt in culture, from women thinking collectively and wanting to support each other to a sudden, individualistic movement about freedoms instead of wanting to change things: “Girls, you’re free. Feminism has achieved everything it ever will. Go out to work. Spend as much money as you want. Be as sexually liberated as you want. Dress up any way you want.”

That was the energy near the turn of the 21st century. It was profoundly felt in culture. The Spice Girls embodied it well with their “girl power” motif. Girl power was originally a slogan in the Riot Grrrl movement. It had an activist, furious energy on the punk rock scene, where women were advocating for change, for space for themselves as artists, for safety. There was an evolution of “girl power” from the activist, third-wave mantra to fun and joyous without really standing for anything.

How might this shift have affected women’s relationships at work?

Reality television, which came of age in the 2000s, was very much a genre of entertainment about individualism. It was all about girls fighting for the prize of a man. There was no sense of solidarity. It was all about the individual—profiles, elevation, success, competition. It captured the ethos of womanhood at the time so well.

Studies show that when women are encouraged to compete with each other, to be very competitive at work, their careers and relationships suffer. A more supportive environment for women is one where there is a sense of collaboration and mutual support, where everyone is less focused on what they can do to improve their individual prospects.

Speaking of collaboration, what can men learn from reading this book?

I really want men to read it. I didn’t write a book about women. I wrote a book about history, and it just so happened that my framing was about portrayals of women in culture [in the early 2000s]. But none of that framing was divorced from what was happening with men at the same time. Movies such as American Pie—which presented men’s quest to lose their virginity as a heroic, bonding, fraternal experience—put a lot of pressure on men of my generation, too. It made it hard for them to consider what they actually wanted, versus the cultural norm at the time.

For example, when my husband read this book, he felt so relieved. There had been a large part of culture that he had never been able to make sense of or felt he could be part of. And I’ve heard from other men who have read the book that they had no idea how bad things were at the time. We were all in an environment that felt so normal that it was hard to actively question it. It was all encompassing. Every form of media had the same message: film, television, books, fashion, music—everywhere you looked.

One of the reasons I really wanted to consider this period was to understand why we were all so numb to its cruelty. I remember waitressing to save money for grad school when Britney Spears shaved her head, and my boss sharing rolling updates like, “She has an umbrella. She just attacked someone.” We were following this woman’s mental health crisis in real time, as a form of entertainment. Nothing about it then felt as obscene to me as it does now, with time and distance. Yet there was profound cruelty and dehumanization of lots of people, particularly women.

So much came from the newness of the internet. Whenever we use new kinds of technology, we don’t immediately have ethical frameworks with which to approach them. With the arrival of the internet, you suddenly had so much more information and access to people’s lives, all the time.

In the moment, it was hard to see these women as human, because they felt so much like characters in ongoing sagas. That’s how I’ve come to try to understand the pervasiveness of cruelty. So much of it is so despicable.

How might cultural focus on women in crisis have translated into a backlash against women’s authority?

In 2007, so many women in the public eye seemed to be having breakdowns. It was also the year that Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president. One of my reasons to revisit the era was to think about what the moment had done to my own sense of what women were capable of, given the dehumanizing treatment of women all over the internet.

I also wondered how this spectacle of dramatic breakdowns might impact our sense of whether a woman is calm and rational enough to be president. I wondered whether that spectacle had somehow, in ways we hadn’t quite processed, contoured what we thought about women in power. 2007 was a very significant year for all those reasons.

Can women express emotion without undermining their own power?

It’s such a complicated question. I’m a crier at work. Ever since I’ve been at The Atlantic, I’ve had crying jags. It’s good to normalize emotions, humanity, and human responses. But I also struggle with this, because I want to present as dignified, capable, rational, and able to be resilient and calm in difficult situations.

In 2007, when Hillary Clinton teared up for the first time on the campaign trail, it was a very controversial moment. Some people said she was showing emotion as a stunt; others said she was too emotional. The moment actually helped her; she won New Hampshire afterward. Perhaps there is some sense that if women can be authentic about when they’re struggling, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

How did the rise of the girlboss affect perceptions of women in power?

After the 2000s, there was a countermovement in which lots of women were writing profound, thoughtful articles about themselves and what they had gone through. People wrote off those works as trauma memoirs or stories of female pain, but those articles were assertions of humanity in many ways. Then, in 2014, came the rise of the girlboss.

Sophia Amoruso, founder of the Nasty Gal clothing brand, published a memoir called #GIRLBOSS that defined the term. It involved tapping into the same individualistic ideals that were prevalent in the late ’90s and 2000s—that women should and could succeed by putting themselves first. It was very much “trickle-down feminism”—the idea that if enough women are elevated and made powerful, they will then, in turn, let the benefits move down to other women.

The principles at the time were less, “Fight for things that benefit all women, like paid leave or parental leave,” and more, “Become a boss, and then you can change the situation.” That’s not necessarily wrong. I’m definitely not opposed to the idea of more women becoming bosses. One of the signs of tangible progress women have made during my lifetime is succeeding in the workforce. So much about that is really important and worthy of celebration. But we’re able to make more progress when we think collectively—not just about ourselves and our own path, but about what it means to be supportive of feminism that works for all women.

How might cultural representations of women contribute to the lack of parity at work—and how could they accelerate progress?

I once interviewed Tom Perrotta, author of the book Election. He told me that he had no idea that [the book’s main] character, Tracy Flick, would become so synonymous with female power. But then he came to understand that there were no other cultural portrayals of women seeking power. There’s a cultural vacuum; they don’t really exist.

What might we do if there were more stories about women in power, more cultural engagement with the subject, not as a bad thing or as something that can be wielded for self-serving reasons? If we had power, what would we actually want, demand, work for, do for other women, for other people? Engaging with the idea of what power can do is very, very important because we’re not getting those kinds of stories. We’re not having our imagination stoked and fed by the culture we consume. Seeing only this lack, maybe there’s space for more to be done. Being a cultural critic, I see that as an obvious place to start.

How is the rise of the ‘manosphere’ affecting women’s roles and representation?

About a year ago, I discovered a fascinating study conducted by the sociologist Alice Evans that tracked gender equality in different moments throughout history. She found that the best reflector of how women were valued in a society and what kind of status they had was related to how much that society prized romantic love. My whole project involves thinking about how culture impacts us, and here you have a body of evidence showing that if a culture prizes romance, it thinks more highly of women.

That is fascinating to me in this particular moment, when so much culture has the same ethos that movies in the 2000s did—male bonding, fraternal love, safe spaces for men to be men, masculine communities online, manosphere podcasts, Twitch streamers. So much of it is overtly masculine in an intentional way. It’s setting younger men up for a future that is not going to serve them well, because we know young men are more lonely. They’re more isolated. We know how important marriage is in terms of men’s long-term health and stability. If you are telling young men that women are not their equal, that women are figures of disdain, that women are to be conquered, not to be valued or considered on equal terms, you’re not setting them up for a happy life with someone who will want to marry them. It’s a logical deduction.

I do worry profoundly about women. I spend my life worrying about women. But I also worry about men. It feels like they’re being failed by culture right now, and it’s not fair to them.

Any thoughts on how the ‘tradwife’ phenomenon might affect perceptions of women at work?

First, I don’t think there’s a shadow economy of women who are secretly tradwives who aren’t making content about it all the time. It feels like performance art or playing a role online. There’s the idea that these women don’t have jobs; they do have jobs. Many of them support their families. They’re the primary earners. They sell an idea of old-fashioned domesticity. But it is performance, and it is content creation, and they do have business and branding deals. What they are doing is labor.

I always want to consider a woman’s individual right to follow any path she chooses, to do anything she wants. If that includes preaching tradwife ideology on the internet, fine. Yet the ways tradwife ideology is intended to cater to the idea of what men want and to enforce male supremacy are troubling. On Reddit, expectations of what a wife might mean are so divorced from what any woman I can think of—in my generation or in the generation younger than me—would ever want from marriage. This is coming from a certain faction of influencers online, and it’s not real.

I see you’ve got a Barbie print on your wall. How does Barbie fit into this narrative?

I love Barbie. Despite myself, I have a real affection for her. I love how the history of Barbie is the history of telling girls they can be anything they want, including president. There’s something thrilling about that sense of possibility. Beauty-wise, yes, she’s absurd. She would topple over. She has no proportional sense of gravity. But how she has stood for freedom and as a significant totem of womanhood over the years is interesting.

In 2016, Mattel launched its body-positive range of Barbies, with different body sizes and shapes. It was a moment of real power for me because it seemed to signal that we as a society were thinking differently about what a body could be, how we could love different body types. Since then, the body positivity movement has unfortunately taken a few blows. But I love that Barbie is still there, still in stores.

I also love the Barbie movie so much because when it came out, I had been feeling this lack of collective energy. Going to that movie and seeing all these other women in pink made me realize, “I’m not alone. We’re all here together. We can, in fact, channel some of this sense of sisterhood if we try.”

What surprised you most when writing this book?

When I set about writing a cultural history of the era, I wasn’t expecting porn to be as much of a presence as it was. I know the book is called Girl on Girl, and that was initially supposed to be a joke. I thought it would be more about conflict between women fostered by different kinds of entertainment.

Yet porn was in everything in the era. It was the dominant cultural product of our time in ways that no one was really open to thinking about or addressing. It was a shadow product that people were consuming in vast numbers. Obviously, that would impact culture. That would impact even our own lives. But there wasn’t a willingness to engage. It’s a little like reality television. Everyone watches it. Yet no one wants to take it seriously or own that it might have influence—substantial influence—as time passes.

I also wasn’t expecting AIDS to be such an influence on 21st-century culture. But there was a moment of such anxiety about sex, freedom, and the effect of the liberation movements of the 1900s. It sparked all these different backlashes and created profound cultural changes that were fascinating to unravel.

Are you watching anything now that you think portrays women constructively?

Definitely. I’ve been watching FX’s Dying for Sex, starring Michelle Williams. It’s a very funny new series that is quite naughty and quite complicated in its ambitions. It’s about a woman who finds out she is dying and has never found a way to acknowledge or pursue her own desires, so she decides to go on a sexual odyssey. It complicates the subject of female desire in a very interesting way.

In the 2000s in film, there were no women characters having meaningful conversations. But at this year’s Golden Globes, there were women in their 50s and 60s having the roles of their lives and sharing stories—complicated and interesting stories—about motherhood, ambition, and beauty culture. That was such a sign of tangible progress on the storytelling front. In so many ways now, our storytelling is leaps and bounds from where it has been.

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